Trump will make the Left Strong Again

On the cycles of democracy

Electoral politics are a pendulum. Right now, the right wing all around the world is in high spirits because of Trump’s victory after 4 years of Biden. However, I will argue that electoral trends so far have shown that the pendulum will swing dramatically to the left in the next couple of years as it did in Trump’s first term which ended with the chaos of 2020. In this essay, we will look into the political and psychological reasons why the most governments turn unpopular and what this means for politics as a whole, and Trump in particular.

The Electoral Pendulum

In all democratic systems a curious trend can be observed, that is that there is almost a constant cycle of a political party winning elections and then losing them and then winning them again. In the case of the US, since WW2 there has only been one case of two candidates of the same party winning-back-to-back (Raegan and Bush sr.), in all other elections one can observe constant pattern of victory and defeat.

People were sick of Bush jr. and elected Obama, then the electorate wanted something completely different and chose Trump. However, the backlash to Trump from 2016 to 2020 was substantial enough to encourage 81 million Americans to vote for Biden in 2020, 15.4 million more than Hillary ever got. The story is repeated once more with Biden losing popularity and Trump defeating Harris last month.

The same pattern can be seen in the politics of almost every single other liberal democracy out there. The latest cycle in Germany has been characterized by CDU dominance under Merkel followed by an electoral victory by Scholtz which will be followed by another CDU victory this time under Merz according to the latest polling. In Britain something similar can be observed with Labour and the conservative party; Blair, then Cameron et al. and now Starmer who will sooner or later lose to the next contender according to his latest miserable approval ratings.

The cyclical nature of democracy in nothing new, even Churchill lost the election of 1945 when he was at the peak of his prestige. There have only been a couple of countries that seem to not follow this trend such as Japan and Singapore. To say that all sitting governments are unpopular is incorrect, there certainly are some that are very popular right now, but we will cover these special cases later in the essay.

The point is that there is more than enough historical precedent to state that democracy is cyclical and that the party in power is, more often than not, on its way out. But why is this? Why does the electorate seem to turn its back on the candidates that they themselves elected just a few years ago?

Hard to please

The answer at a political level is that the job of the opposition is much easier than the job of the sitting government. The opposition only has to critique the actions of the government and promise to the public that they'll solve all current and future problems. On the other hand, successfully running a popular government is a very difficult challenge; the electorate will give more weight to the government’s deficiencies, both real and imagined, than to its concrete successes which the electorate often takes for granted.

The reality is that the political instinct of the vast majority of people tends to focus on the negative results and events that happen under each administration. This fact alone makes sitting governments unpopular because they will get the blame for things that are even out of their control because the electorate thinks that whatever happens in the country must be the leader’s responsibility. For example, one of the main reasons why Joe Biden lost the election last month was the economy specifically; inflation.

However, in western-style liberal democracies, the head of state actually holds very limited power over the government, the economy, and its foreign policy. In the years after the pandemic, almost all world economies faced high levels of inflation due to increased government spending. There is little that any president can do about the state of the economy since he only has limited control over the federal budget, the Department of Commerce or the Federal Reserve.¹

So, the fact that the Democrats lost the election because of the economy shows that the electorate can be a bit irrational sometimes, another example is that Trump lost in 2020 partly because of the pandemic, although the restrictions and lockdowns were managed at a state level.

(I remember reading that Genghis Khan solidified his power partly because in the first years of his rule there was more rain. This led to greener pastures and more prosperity for the nomadic Mongols, the people interpreted the rains as a symbol that Tengri, the sky god, approved of the new Khan. In principle, I don’t think that we have outgrown the instinct of praising or cursing a leader according to things that he simply does not control.)

When one looks at the approval ratings for leaders across the world, one notices that the more developed a country is, the worse its approval rating and that the most popular leaders tend to be from developing countries. By “developing” I am not using an euphemism for poor, I mean countries come from bad situations that are actually developing such as India where Modi enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any world leader with an approval rating of 76%. Milei also enjoys a healthy approval rating of 66%, the highest approval ratings are for countries at war such as Russia where Putin enjoys an approval rating of 87% and Zelenskyy enjoys one of 69% (Both according to Statista).

In contrast, most developed countries have very unpopular governments; Scholz has an approval rating of 19%, Macron 18%, Trudeau 26%, and Biden is at 37%. My explanation for this is that of inertia; that the electorate’s feelings are the result of change. When things are bad and are getting better, the electorate feels a clear improvement which is the case with Modi and Milei. When your country is India or Argentina, there is much room for improvement, and it is possible to make your country 20% better in a couple of years.

On the other hand, it is not easy to create the same change in Germany or the USA. Since these countries are already developed, it is much easier to go down than it is to go up. Therefore, their electorates are much more negative because they do not feel that there is much improvement happening.

As a result, almost all presidents and prime ministers are a disappointment because before the election they promised to make the country 50% better only achieve a 1 or 2% improvement in the best cases, while in the average case, the country actually gets slightly worse. While the electorate becomes disillusioned with the government, the opposition is more than happy to promise a 51% improvement if they are elected, and so the democratic cycle turns on and on.

The four-year Plan

The political energy of any movement depends directly on two things, how much it feels threatened and what its goals are. When a political movement wins an election and their candidate becomes head of state, the political energy of this movement tends to go down since they have achieved their goal and on the other hand, they do not feel threatened by the opposition, since they just won.

Victory results in less political energy; a perfect example of this is the amount of political energy that the Democratic Party had during the Biden presidency. It was nothing compared to the amount of political energy that we saw in 2020, because in 2020 Trump was president and the left found itself in the opposition. When a movement is in the opposition, their political energy tends to increase dramatically since they have a clear goal, which is to bring down the government, and they feel threatened because their enemies control said government. Indeed, I would argue that fear is the main source of political energy.

These two factors together allow a political movement to grow and make its presence felt. As the result of their four years in opposition, Trump's movement successfully defeated Harris and now we are expecting a new Trump presidency. I would argue that a substantial part of Trump's victory was that he was not in the Oval Office.

However, now the tables are starting to turn, Trump has been elected and his supporters feel elated that they have won, meanwhile the left is in full panic mode. This means that the right’s political energy will go down, while the left’s will go up.

We already know how this looks like. Or at least the people who were politically active from 2016 to 2020. Essentially it means that Trump will start losing momentum if he does not deliver on the lofty promises made in his campaign while being blamed for everything else under the sun. To compensate for not controlling the presidency, the left will exercise more political power everywhere else, in entertainment, in street protests, and probably in social media censorship. And let us not forget the left's campaign against Trump from 2016 to 2020 was ultimately successful in defeating him.

Therefore, my prediction for the next 4 years is that the left wing will become much stronger and not only in the US, but around the world. In terms of culture and politics the world dances to America's tune, as Trump derangement syndrome accelerates in the US, the left wing around the developed world will be in high alert to prevent a Trump-like figure in their own countries.

I know that this message will not be exactly what most right wingers want to hear, everybody wants to believe that they have already won and their enemies are vanquished. But I truly believe that the Trump presidency is in a race against the clock where they have a couple of years before the electorate turns against him as it has already happened in every other cycle. So then the question is; how can a political movement succeed given that sooner or later the electorate will turn against it?

A political one night stand

The electorate loves a candidate, until it doesn’t. I would even argue that the love of the people is very much like the love in a one-night stand. Everything is wonderful until the sun rises and then she's gone.

In a very real sense, the electorate is an unfaithful whore and to try to marry her, hoping that she will stay faithful and not run off with the opposition, you will end up tragically disappointed. So, what are the possible strategies to succeed as a political movement in a democracy?

1. The Q&D method

The first strategy would be to rush everything through, taking into account that you only have a grace period of a year or two before the electorate turns on you, the government should do everything as fast as possible so that by the time that they lose popularity, their ideas will be law.

We can call this the quick and dirty method of political change, the issue with this strategy is that it can be easily reversed and, most importantly, all liberal democracies have a Byzantine system of checks and balances to prevent exactly this.

If Donald Trump would attempt to rush a reform of the government, his reforms would end up in the desk of the Supreme Court which will take several months to come to a decision for each separate reform. And until the Supreme Court ratifies each fundamental change (which is unlikely), they can just be ruled as unconstitutional and will not be obeyed by most government agencies.

So, the quick and dirty method really works in systems where the president has actual executive power which is almost unchecked by the legislature or the Supreme Court. However, this is certainly not the case in most Western countries.

2. The Gradual method

The gradual method is all about playing the long game, it understands that there will be cycles in democracy and that a political movement will rise and fall and rise again in terms of popularity. This strategy is based on moving the Overton window over to your side so that even when your political movement loses power, the opposition cannot reverse most reforms because they have already been culturally accepted.

This would be akin to extending the one-night stand to a situation where you try to win her over while mogging the competition; you maximize your political gains when you are in power, and you minimize the gains that your enemies can make when they are in power. If this sounds familiar it is because this has been the strategy of the left wing for some time now.

For example, before gay marriage was legalized in the US, most people and both parties were against it, however, after it was legalized in 2015 it was unthinkable that the Trump presidency would attempt to make it illegal once more, since this move would have been out of the Overton window.

The gradualist strategy works best when there is a well-developed civil service which is independent from the president’s power. This is most certainly the case in most western style democracies; the agencies that actually run the government are not controlled by the president and therefore cannot be influenced by the electorate. With the government agencies on your side, it is possible to take ground with a strategy of advancing when conditions are favorable and digging in for enemy counter attacks World War One style.

3. The founder effect

The founder effect is the political advantage that a movement gets when it is essentially the founder of the nation. This effect can be seen in younger democracies where the state was essentially built by one single party which is still around dominating the political scene. I think that the best example of this is Japan; the Liberal Democratic Party has been in power for almost the entire existence of post imperial Japan (from 1955 to 2024 there have only been 4 years where the LDP was not in power) and indeed it is almost synonymous with the Japanese state itself. A more recent example is how Modi has reshaped India in the last 10 years and how this great amount of change reflects itself onto the popularity of his party, the BJP.

To go back to our one-night stand analogy, the founder effect could be compared to the love of a financially interested woman who marries a promising young millionaire. She will love him as long as he keeps making money and giving her a lot of it, however, she will leave him the moment that his bank account dries up.

As long as a ruling party is successful in transforming the country, it will remain popular since the older generations will have great trust in this institution, however, the power of this strategy will begin to wane as the country reaches a high level of development or in the case of an economic crisis. In both cases, the ruling political party will become unpopular, that is unless you use the 4th strategy.

4. Dedemocratization

The 4th strategy, the forbidden strategy, is to keep the electorate loyal by umm how shall we say… uh… ending democracy. The idea is that if your one-night stand will leave you sooner or later, so, you essentially… barricade the door. By stopping the democratic process when your faction is in power, you can do whatever you want, as long as you can keep the electorate happy enough so they don't escape.

Dedemocratization is essentially done by alienating and effectively eliminating any opposition that the electorate can gravitate towards. This of course can be done with different methods, there are softer methods such as banning opposition parties by declaring them unconstitutional, which is practiced by many countries around the world. However, harder and more violent methods are also possible, such as street violence and the use of a secret police.

This weakens the opposition to such a point that the electorate stops seeing them as a possible alternative to your power. In such a case, the electorate also becomes disillusioned with time, however, instead of embracing a non-existent opposition, they simply embrace apathy and become progressively depoliticized. In practical terms, the average person simply begins to not care much about politics since there is not much that they can do.

This political status quo remains stable as long as no viable opposition exists and as long as the government does not fuck up in a major way which leads to a loss of confidence. However, this is easier said than done because today an opposition can very easily form with the support of your international opponents who will attempt to undermine your government.

Most political movements which enjoy the founder effect also tend to weaken their opposition through different means. For example, the people's action party of Singapore, has essentially created the modern state of Singapore with all its riches. However, they also make opposition to their 65-year-long rule difficult by using the legal system against possible opposition parties and having direct control of the media.

This strategy is the standard for most of the states around the world, every government has its own reasons for cracking down on opposition; it can be to rob the country blind or to bring it forward. But in the cases of effective governments like Singapore’s, their anti-democratic tendencies come from the belief that the electorate is not capable of ruling itself, that the people are more likely to vote for Hugo Chavez as they were for Lee Kwan Yew. The question is: Are they wrong?

Trump’s gambit

So, now I think that I can clearly define the dilemma that Trump and his movement are in. In all likelihood Trump's four years of presidency will be the perfect opportunity for the left to become stronger and to return to the energy that they had in 2020. Sooner or later, Trump will lose the electorate, maybe in four years maybe in eight years, but to expect this to be the beginning of a long chain of republican presidents is unrealistic seeing the previous trends.

The time is ticking and there are only four possible strategies to achieve political power. The founder effect does not apply in the US and I really have a hard time imagining Trump persecuting his opposition through legal or extrajudicial means America isn't exactly Russia. So, the only two viable strategies open to the Republican Party are the quick and dirty method and the gradual method.

I believe that both will be tried, however, the quick and dirty method (as we have already discussed) has limited potential inside of a modern western democracy with a weak executive. That only leaves the gradual method where the Republican Party and the conservative movement manage to shift the Overton window rightwards, this might be the only way to achieve lasting success. However, this strategy requires two things; control of most government bureaucracies and cultural dominance, which is certainly not the case today, most civil servants overwhelmingly lean towards Democrats² and the conservative movement has many things, but cultural dominance is not one of them.

Although I am watching this from outside the United States, since I'm not American, it seems to me that to celebrate a victory is premature. The coming Trump administration has no clear route to political power and the historical trends point to the left-wing gaining influence in the next four years all over the world. I am not ready to declare that Trump is doomed, because, as Bismark said; “politics is the art of the possible”. What I will say is that we certainly live in interesting times and that in the coming years we should keep our eyes on the left.

1. The president only has the power to appoint certain roles in these organizations, but does not have the power to fire or significantly change the policy of the organization and the political appointees do not hold absolute power over the bureaucracies. The president has much less power than congress, which gets the final decision on the budget and holds little power over monetary policy which is decided by the federal reserve which is independent.

One can argue that the president does have impact on the economy because the head of state represents the nation and can inspire confidence in the economy which will lead to higher trust with investors, or the opposite if the president undermines the trust in the government, but this economic impact is purely indirect.

2.